Postmodern Art Critic

Untitled (Invitation), 2026 Mixed media: grilled meat, community, late capitalism

The work resists easy categorization.

What the Boston Magic Lab proposes — and it is, emphatically, a proposition rather than a mere gathering — is nothing less than a radical interrogation of the post-seasonal body. The gesture toward barbecue is, of course, not really about barbecue. It never was.

We are invited, if “invited” is even the right word (and it isn’t), to present ourselves at 70 Scituate Street, Arlington — a site chosen not despite but because of its domesticity, its deliberate refusal of the institutional. The rear garden functions here as a kind of anti-gallery: verdant, contingent, smelling of charcoal. The lawn does not care about your feelings. This is the point.

The piece is scheduled for the seventeenth of May, 2026, at one o’clock in the afternoon — a time selected, one suspects, for its aggressive normality, its bourgeois legibility. The afternoon says: we are not trying to be difficult. The afternoon lies.

Central to the work is Jeannine, whose presence at the grill enacts a complex negotiation of gendered domestic labor and pyrotechnic mastery. To call her the BBQ Dad — as the artists do, without apparent irony, and yet with irony so dense it folds back on itself — is to invoke the whole troubled history of who stands at the fire and why. She stands at the fire. She is very good at it. The smoke means something. We are still working out what.

Guests are asked to bring food and drink to share. This participatory dimension situates the work firmly in the tradition of relational aesthetics — Bourriaud, obviously, but also something older and less theorized, something that smells like potato salad. The coordination of provisions remains, at time of writing, unresolved. The artists have described this as “intentional.” They have not been challenged on this.

Produced under the auspices of Felice and the Critics, the work will run for one afternoon only. There is no catalogue. There is no artist’s talk, though someone will inevitably hold forth near the cooler. Attendance is not mandatory but is, in some sense that resists articulation, expected.

The Magic Lab does not explain itself. The smoke rises. The season has ended.

Come, or don’t. The grill will not wait. Neither will meaning.

— From the collection notes, Boston Magic Lab Annual Survey, 2026